Is There Hope For The GOP?

Perhaps he recognizes that the party of Reagan is defenseless these days, having abdicated the principles which built the modern GOP – principles that have long enjoyed the high regard of a majority of Americans, millions of them nominal Democrats.

All of this is hardly news: conservatives have been on the ropes for years, and no one else in the GOP ever had any principles to begin with. Even now, the Tea Party diehards are getting the back of the hand from an ungrateful establishment. Republicans have fallen far from the moral high ground that conservatives built for the party in the days when the Gipper united it.

The fact that the GOP is still around at all might reflect the sad fact that many people of principle simply think there’s nowhere else to go. But that negative is a far cry from a positive – and it shows.

Speaking of negatives, it goes without saying these days that Democrats have long since abandoned principle altogether – unless, of course, lust for power can be called a “principle.” Augustine calls this Deadly Sin the libido dominandi, and how timeless and tireless it is: today’s defiant Democrats have merely packed a gaggle of self-indulgent interest groups into their crowded corral of corruption, paying them off with taxpayer-funded benefits, preferences, affirmations of a stunning variety of sexual indulgences and prurient privileges, crony cash, and, when all else fails, the promise of a friendly wink from the Leviathan.

The makeup of this captive collective remarkably reflects Rousseau’s Volonté de Tous, that mélange of individual interests that the Sovereign rejects in favor of the absolute power conferred by the Volonté Generale – the General Will. That cynical concoction empowers the Sovereign to decide all by himself what is good and what is evil [viz. Genesis 3:5]. This deft sleight of hand allows the tyrant to exercise absolute power [kratos] over the people [demos] “for their own good.”

Thus is Lincoln’s famous formulation – “of the people, by the people, and for the people” – effortlessly hijacked (as Mel Bradford predicted long ago).

And those who resist? Rousseau concedes with a sigh that, well, “they must be forced to be free.” Brandishing that ersatz seal of moral approval, aspiring tyrants can easily seduce a veritable ocean of do-gooders, unwitting accomplices in the extermination of liberty.

No wonder, then, that the Founders loathed Rousseau’s democracy and established its opposite, a constitutional republic – which, as Tocqueville and even the Supreme Court acknowledged, thrived because we were a “Christian nation.”

Today, channeling Rousseau and Lenin, the Democrat Left has hollowed out the republic, discarding its principles and turned the dessicated husk upside-down. And why not? Didn’t Lenin say that Marx stood Hegel on his head? Once one denies the realm of the spiritual altogether, the Party has all the Power of Pilate to determine good and evil.

Falsehood always brings violence in its wake, said Solzhenitsyn, and the victims of the Leftist Lie are legion. Consider the Christian (and also constitutional) principle of subsidiarity, which reserves to small communities the freedom to handle their own affairs without interference from the central government. For the Left (including the Republican Left and the Christian Left, by the way), this principle is anathema. But it is useful, so the Power Party has hijacked it and corrupted it, all without a fight: now power must flow from the top down, implemented by commissars and apparatchiks (ours wear suits) who oppress, rather than respect, a free people.

Those are the same free people whom the Founders regarded as the locus of authority in a constitutional republic.
For the Democrat Left, down is always up. All around us we see that cause and effect and other laws of nature still abide – defy them, and our political and social culture sinks into chaos. So the only things that work today are drones, iPads, and Obama’s Thought Police.

Do Republicans Have An Alternative?

Well, back to the GOP, that party of principle.

Oh, really?

You’d think Republicans would learn.

Remember Woodrow Wilson’s “War To End All Wars”? It didn’t. Instead, it launched a century of violence and lies, feeding on innocent blood.

In like manner, Franklin Roosevelt’s insatiable appetite for flattery at Yalta gave Stalin one hundred million Christians in Eastern Europe to suffer under Soviet rule for half of a century.

By the time LBJ’s war in Viet Nam – complete with Richard Nixon’s “Secret Plan” to end it – came and went, Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Bob Dole could famously condemn “Democrat Wars” in 1976, underscoring the solidly Republican alternative of “Peace and Prosperity.” Dole wasn’t able to make that stick, but Ronald Reagan did, making him the most popular president in living memory.

And then along came George W. Bush, who was as uneasy his conservative platform in 2000 as FDR was with his in 1932. But “9-11 changed everything,” so the dialectic trumped principle, and “Big-Government Conservatism” quickly became the new normal. While Obama was still a no-show in the Illinois State Senate, the Bush-Cheney administration laid the ideological and legal groundwork for the campaign that is destroying the Republic today. Obama is only picking up where Bush left off.

The irony is cruel and unrelenting. Rejecting the Founders and resurrecting Wilson, Bush and Cheney decided to “make the world safe for democracy.” They stood Bob Dole on his head, turning the Republican Party upside down – celebrating power, while ignoring the Constitution, Congress, and history.

Alas, a “rump parliament” of Christian “Happy-Talkers” in the GOP Hot Tub still celebrates Bush’s “triumphs,” even as Obama’s grim offensive against liberty continues to build on the fertile ground that Bush’s dialectic graciously, albeit perhaps mindlessly, bequeathed to him.

Why do they persist?

Principles – For Sale, Cheap!

Well, over the years, an increasing number of Republican Regulars have bought into the formula that the Democrats have used to destroy the GOP. The ease with which this well-heeled Hot Tub Herd has been tamed by baubles and banalities brings to mind another immorality tale, recounted in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart.

There, England’s King Edward, known as “Longshanks,” faces Gibson in the role of William Wallace, who leads the Scots in the Battle of Falkirk. Longshanks is smug, having bought off Wallace’s allies, Lochlan and Mornay. The instructive scene is set as Longshanks calls for his dragooned Irish troops to engage the Scots.

General: Mornay, Lochlan?

Longshanks: I gave Mornay double his lands in Scotland and matching estates in England. Lochlan turned for much less.

Archers!

General: I beg your pardon, sire. Won’t we hit our own troops?

Longshanks: Yes, but we’ll hit theirs as well. We have reserves.

Attack!

In this exchange we observe venality in all its glory. Yes, the GOP’s ambitious nobility aspire to a payoff like Mornay’s, but, like Lochlan, all too many have “turned for much less.”

But Mel leaves a haunting message for the sellouts of our own age: the battle lost, Wallace tracks down Lochlan and Mornay, and kills them both.

Kindred Topics and Related Threads

2 Responses to Is There Hope For The GOP?

Of course there’s no hope for the GOP. There is no hope now for any secular party. We must call for the formation of a third party, a religious party, not necessarily a Catholic party for now, but a ‘Christian’ party such as is found in Hungary’s coalition that made their success possible, a party which stands for life and also for the kind of economics that really will deal with the too-big-to-fails, which neither the Republicans nor the Democrats–oh hell the Republicats, because they are both stinkin’ liberals.

For sure, there is no hope either for the Republicans, nor for the Democrats.

“In his 1926 work, The Outline of Sanity, vaunted English journalist and author, G.K. Chesterton put forth his arguments against both Capitalism and Socialism. Chesterton essentially argues that the problem with Capitalism is that it leads to Socialism. Now there’s a thought. All too briefly put, the tendency of both Capitalism and Socialism is to centralize power. Capitalism places power in the hands of the few rich who actually own capital, while the vast majority work as (wage) slaves for the rich who own the factories and shops. The result is a de facto plutocracy. Socialism places complete power in the hands of the government, which leads to individual freedom being subordinated to the will of the State. The result is a de facto totalitarian state. Both the plutocracy of the Capitalist state and totalitarianism of the Socialist state are particular manifestations of an oligarchy. The rich are always the privileged few, just as it is the few who hold real power in a totalitarian state. The common man, which is the mass of men, lose in either case, even if Capitalism is to be preferred to Socialism.

As the old saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is certainly true of political power, as we have seen time and time again throughout history. The philosophy of Socialism is flawed in its very nature, but Chesterton thinks Capitalism is too. As was noted in my last post on this topic, and to once again quote Chesterton, “Capitalism is contradictory as soon as it is complete; because it is dealing with the mass of men in opposite ways at once… [the capitalist] is wanting the same man to be rich and poor at the same time.”

So what is the answer? Chesterton, among others, believed the answer is to distribute property to individuals, so they can be self sufficient and once again know the joy of true ownership and individual responsibility. Chesterton believed small business is better than big business. Chesterton believed being a free man working your own land is to be preferred to being a wage slave. But Chesterton also recognized that this is not the ideal of all. He suggests that while not all will immediately hold to this ideal, many will once they seriously consider their present state of affairs. Of course, a modern society cannot consist of only small farm owners; there must be a balance. However, Chesterton maintains that the common man in a Capitalist society is really worse off than he realizes; once this is recognized, the idea of Distributism will take hold. More on this and what Distributism is in a later post.”

The era of Big Business (Rabide Capitalism) has led to our era’s of Socialism.

We do need a third party. A Distributist Party. One that follows Catholic Social Doctrine.